1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for formatting a document in accordance with document data and format data.
2. Description of the Background Art
There are known methods of formatting document data such as `Roff` in which format data necessary for carrying out formatting are incorporated in the document data. In such a method, it may be necessary to change the format data incorporated in the document data in order, for example, to change the number of the blank lines between headings and paragraphs that follow. Such a change in the format data has to be made at each appearance of the heading, so that corrections of this kind can become very time-consuming and inconsistency due to overlooking happens very often.
To cope with this situation, the formatting system `Scribe` has been proposed in which the document data and the format data are given independently, so that a single change in the format data concerning the spacing between the headings and the paragraphs suffices for this type of correction to be made over the entire document. Also, by using different types of format data, the same document can be formatted in various manners in this formatting system `Scribe`.
However, in a formatting of this kind, the management of data becomes complicated because the document data and format data are independently given. Namely, which one of various format data has been used in formatting particular document data can easily be forgotten by the time corrections have to be made, so it becomes necessary to try out each of various format data one by one in order to find the right one.